"James P. Hogan - The Proteus Operation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

While the seamen carried the kit out, Ferracini looked around at the people in the
wardroom. This would no doubt be their last time together as a group. Just as they had begun


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getting to know something about one another after four days in the cramped confines of the
submarine, the voyage had ended, and they would all be whisked away in different directions. It
was like life in general -- nothing permanent; nothing lasting; nothing to attach roots to.
Ferracini felt weary at the futility of it all.

The two scientists, Mitchell and Frazer, were still wearing oddments of the homemade
uniforms of the Prison Guard Section, British Security Police -- effectively a locally recruited
branch of the SS -- in which they had contrived their escape from the political concentration camp
on Dartmoor. In earlier years, Mitchell, a specialist in high-temperature corrosion chemistry, had
been forced to work in the program that was supposed to have led to the first German lunar landing
in 1968. Frazer had been working on inertial guidance computers before Berlin ordered his arrest
for alleged ideological failings.

Smithgreen -- certainly not his real name -- was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician of some
kind who had managed, incredibly, to evade detection ever since England's surrender to Germany on
the first day of 1941. Maliknin was an escaped Russian slave laborer who had worked on the German
ICBM silos in northern Siberia. Pearce -- again, undoubtedly a pseudonym -- had bleached his hands
and facial skin and straightened his hair in order to survive the African genocide of the sixties.

Then there was the woman who was called "Ada," slumped in a chair at one end of the
wardroom table and staring vacantly at the bulkhead as she had for most of the voyage. England
might have surrendered in 1941, but Ada never had. She had continued fighting a one-woman war
against the Nazis for over thirty years, ever since the day when, as a young schoolteacher in
Liverpool, she had watched her husband, father, and two brothers being marched away as labor
conscripts for deportation to the Continent, never to be heard of again. Revenge had become her
way of life. Using forged papers, disguises, and a score of aliases, she had reputedly killed one
hundred sixty-three Nazis, including a Reich Governor, three district commissioners, the Gestapo
chiefs of two British cities, and dozens of British collaborators in local government. She had
been arrested repeatedly, had suffered interrogations, beatings, and torture; she had been
sentenced to death six times, escaping on four occasions and twice being left for dead. Now, in
her fifties, she was burned out, aged prematurely by a life of hatred, violence, and ordeals of
the kind evidenced by the gnarled scar tissue at the ends of the fingers of her right hand, where
nails used to be. Her fighting was done, but the information that she carried in her head would be
priceless.

Ferracini's survey of the wardroom finally brought him to the young man with the mustache
and the blonde girl who were known only by their code names "Polo" and "Candy." Both of them were
U.S. agents returning home after an operational tour. Ferracini had no idea what they had been
involved in, and it was better that things should remain that way.

Vibrations shook the structure, and the sounds of machinery came from nearby. There were
no pointless dramatics among the company, or pretensions that their relationships would endure.
After briefly muttered thanks and farewells, Ferracini and Vorkoff led the way out into the